


Spite

by HostisHumaniGeneris



Category: Alien Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 16:38:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15271740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/pseuds/HostisHumaniGeneris
Summary: She went to jail because she wouldn't sell out her gang.  She joined the Corps to get out of jail.  She went through Hell in training because she joined the Corps.  She was her squad's badass gunner because she'd gone through Hell.  She'd risked her life for her squad because they were her squad.  And it all led to one conclusion.





	Spite

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nemirovitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemirovitch/gifts).



“I didn’t kill her.” She said, glaring through the wire-reinforced Plexiglas between her and her court-appointed attorney.  She was

“It doesn’t matter.” He said.  “You were accompanying Mister…”

She scowled deeply as he began flipping through the paperwork she was holding, muttering ‘mister’ over and over.  He hadn’t even bothered to learn the name of her… accomplice, that was the term.  She was arrested and facing jail and he couldn’t be bothered to memorize the person who actually killed the lady they were robbing.

Annoyed, she muttered. “Steven Chang.”

“Right.  You were accompanying Mister Chang on a burglary, and he shot and killed the homeowner.”

It wasn’t supposed to end like that.  The house was supposed to be empty.  Simply get in, grab everything, and get out.  How the fuck were they supposed to know the wife was home sick from work that day?  “It was Chang.”

“And that’s what I’m trying to explain.” The lawyer looked uncomfortable.  Like he had a reason to be.  “It’s called Felony Murder.  You two were committing a felony; burglary.  Then, to further it, your accomplice killed Misses…”

“Guerra.”

“Misses Guerra.” He said, then like she was the person who didn’t know anything about the case, he explained.  “Legally, Mister Chavez is culpable for murder, and as his accomplice, you’re equally culpable.”

This was bullshit.  She didn’t even have a gun on her… which was the principle reason that she hadn’t shot Tia.  _Los Lobos_ were moving in on the Reds’ territory, and Tia Guerra was working for the _Lobos_ , selling something, Vasquez didn’t know, wasn’t her job to know.  Her job was to go with Steve, break in, scare her, and steal whatever it was.

Tia was uncooperative, no great loss.

Unfortunately, the one goddamn tine the cops actually bothered to respond to an emergency call in the neighborhood was the time her and Steve were knee deep in narcotics and the corpse of a woman who made the wrong choice in going against the reds. 

Steve went out in a Blaze of glory.  She froze.  Locked up, then got locked up.

And so here they were.

“You’re looking at life in prison.” The lawyer said, in practiced sympathy.  “I mean, you’re a juvenile, but given the circumstances it’s gang related, there were drugs involved… things aren’t looking good.”

“Gang related?” Vasquez asked, flatly.  “Don’t they have to prove that?”

“You were wearing the Reds’ colors…” He responded.  Yeah, she was wearing red.  So what, wasn’t his job to confuse it.  “…and were caught with a known member of the gang in the home of someone with connections to a rival gang.  They have more than enough.”

Okay, fair enough.  She wasn’t going to be able to convince a jury she’d just was heading to choir practice and tripped over the pile of drugs and the dead _Lobos_ idiot.  But what the fuck was a lawyer here for?  She didn’t need someone to come in and say ‘You’re fucked, Jenette’?  She took in a deep breath.  “So… what do we do?”

 “The DA’s office is willing to make a deal…” Okay, admit she and Steve were out to rob Tia, fucked up, got Tia killed, and get a lower sentence.  That was fine.  Except the douchebag was shuffled papers from his briefcase and looked at her.   “…they’ll want a commitment to testify against other members of your gang.  The ones who ordered the theft, and the ones who…”

“No.”

“Jenette, they can offer you witness protection.”

“No.”

“Jenette…”

“Fuck you.”

“It’s your life.”

Yeah it was.  But she’d give it for the crew.

* * *

“My name is Private First Class Theresa Mendel.  United States Colonial Marine Corps” The Marine said.  Crisp dress uniform, perfect posture, jaw set and eyes surveying the crowd.  “And I’m here to talk to you about the Juvenile Military Rehabilitation Program.”

She looked like asshole.

Drake had the same thoughts when he leaned in next to Vasquez and voiced that comment, maybe loud enough for Mendel to overhear.  Vasquez didn’t visibly react, but smiled inwardly.  Drake sat back, small grin on his face.

She’d met Drake in the Two Palms Youth Detention Facility.  Like her, he was there for murder.  Unlike he pulled the trigger.  Honestly, he was the kind of guy who she’d probably hate outside of detention, but in the facility, she wasn’t blessed with choice in terms of friends.  Drake had pissed of the same people she had; the same C.O.s and the same gangs. 

That made them allies.  That was important; most of the Reds ended up in other detention facilities or dead, so she had to make allies or be outnumbered.  The fact that during the riot last year they’d gotten into a fight with a bunch of idiots from the Twelfth Street Snakes and ended up spending a month in the infirmary afterwards made them friends.  The Snakes had gotten the worse of the fight, anyways.

Both of them were going to reach eighteen though, and that would mean a transfer to prison, rather than a juvenile facility.  Life in adult prison, with even more obtrusive controls and less oversight for the guards.  Hell, maybe they’d ship their asses to some backwater mine or refinery on some worthless rock a billion miles away from Earth.  

That was her future.

At least, until Private First Class Asshole was brought in to give a speech to the potential lifers, or people whose sentences were long enough that they’d be retirement aged by the time their asses left prison.  Practiced, probably scripted and read before committee after committee before Mendel had actually seen it.  Humanity was reaching for the stars.   She actually used that bullshit Wey-Yu slogan ‘Building Better Worlds’.

The speech, once you stripped out all of the bullshit was that the corporations needed the Marines to kick in the heads of outlaws, pirates, and colonists who decided to tear up their contracts and declare their independence from the companies so kind to dump them on barren rocks in the middle of space. The Marine Corps needed more warm bodies that could hold guns than they currently had, so would you worthless violent inmates like a chance to fire some guns and bash some skulls?  Both of those did sound like fun, although, _fuck_ was Mendel doing her best to make that sound less interesting than sitting in a cell watching paint dry.

Mendel must’ve read something in her face, because she looked Vasquez right in the eye when she said “…of course, if you don’t have what it takes, the Corps would appreciate you not wasting its time and budget shipping you off and training you only to watch you wash out partway through.”

Whatever.

She’d fucking join up, sure.  She’d join up and be the best fucking jarhead she could, if only to spite Mendel.

* * *

It was graduation day.  The ceremony was almost funny in how pathetic it was, how the brass still insisted the recruits have their uniforms in order, stand at the ready.  Some officer who Vasquez had never seen during the months of training was giving a speech about how when everyone else doubted these recruits, the Corps had believed in them.

Yeah right.

The Corps, or someone in the Corps had hoped they’d fail.  There was no other reason to have members of the Program train here.

HE-578, or Helena was a barren ball of rock that had been scouted by the Chigusa Corporation as a potential colony site, then abandoned when terraforming costs skyrocketed.  They had still made the place livable, barely. The air was constantly thin, the old Atmosphere Processors creaking as it struggled to make things livable for the rotating batch of convicts.  Temperatures varied from below freezing to twenty-five centigrade on a ‘mild’ day and night, and fierce storms kicked glassine silica up at unpredictable intervals.  These were all reasons why Chigusa decided to not build here.

These were also the reasons the Corps decided to train convicts here. 

Prison worlds were harsh.  And until they had been fully graduated, they were not yet pardoned.  Still prisoners.  Actual enlistees got Earth, or a planet similar enough in the backwaters to be trained on.  The members of the Program had to bust their asses twice as hard on this stupid rock. 

Hell, even afterwards, they couldn’t use their newfound freedom until they finished their hitch as Marines.

The drill sergeants had been here for years, adapted to the miserable air and weather, and used to the slightly higher gravity which made every action the recruits did take a little extra effort. Over the course of the day all those little extra efforts piled up. And the instructors made sure to let the recruits know how slow moving and easily tired they were.

Less than half of the trainees who signed into the program were standing on the podium.  Most people who weren’t on the podium had just tapped out; they had enough of orders, had enough of this planet, had enough of Corps life, they’d be spending the rest of their sentence behind bars.  Some had to leave due to injuries, free to try again if they could pass the fitness test.  And maybe one out of twenty froze at night or died of heatstroke on a hot day or had their lungs shredded by a duststorm.

She and Drake and Metzger and Sigler had stuck by one another, shored each other up.  That’s what got you through Helena; work with others.  You couldn’t shirk your work off on others all the time, but sticking with the same people, helping when you could, getting help when you needed it, that was completely necessary.

They’d all be shifted around to units in need of manpower; they might be Marines, but the Corps wasn’t going to equip an entire platoon of ex-cons as a cohesive unit.  It took ridiculously long for them to finally call her name and hand her the conditional pardon and her assignment, and another agonizingly long wait for the process to repeat itself until they were out of recruits.  Part of her wanted to tear open the assignment and compare notes, she who, if any of her crew, she’d be with.  But that would be a breach of decorum.

In other words, for bullshit reasons she had to wait to find out if she'd know anyone on the other side.

And somehow, despite the temperature extremes, the screaming instructors, the dust storms, the slightly off gravity, waiting was the hardest part.  Finding out that she and Drake would end up on the same Platoon was worth it, though.  She liked the thought of going into the situation with a familiar face at her back.

There wasn’t going to be any tearful goodbyes.  They’d all made it through, got their asses kicked harder than they’d ever gotten while incarcerated. 

* * *

Vasquez leaned gasping.  The room was cockeyed, or she was, and something twisted and in her guts.

Tequila was apparently a bad choice.

She’d had beer while running with the Reds, only one or two at a time, but it had been years since she’d had any alcohol.  She didn’t trust the hooch other detainees made in the hall, and there wasn’t exactly anything to drink on Helena unless you wanted to try and steal from the drill sergeant who loved that miserable fucking rock. So maybe downing as much Tequila as she could wasn't the best idea.  She’d lived through her first firefight, and she was starting to wonder if the victory celebration was going to kill her.

One of the locals, some roughneck who drove a loader or something probably, snickered at her discomfort.  She tried to glare at him, but flinched when something clapped on her shoulder unexpectedly.  “Now, she may not look like much, but this here lady is the reason you people aren’t dead yet.”

Fucking Hudson.

“Izzat so?” The local said, leaning in close.  Marines and local toughguys got along like a house on fire.  Dumbass colonists put in a distress call, the _Sulaco_ answered it, put the crew raiding this hellhole in the ground, and now the dumbass colonists were looking to start shit. Not that she and her fellow marines were feeling particularly well-disposed to these idiots, either.

It was blind luck; something wrong with the engines meant the _Sulaco_ had to slow down, which put them in a position to respond immediately to the distress signal that they would've otherwise been out of range of.  No engine trouble would’ve meant the colonists would’ve gotten help in two-to-three weeks.

“Yeah, ‘at’s so.” Hudson replied, beaming.  He was back to his usual loudmouth self; she’d have thought the firefight would’ve knocked that out of him.  All that bitching about ‘not getting’ paid enough for this shit’ while keeping his head down then, and now he was back to being a badass.

He’d done his job during the firefight, granted.  And she did hers.

The idiots with the brilliant plan to ransack a mining colony picked a bad spot to get into a firefight.  Tight corridor, the cover was mostly empty crates.  The kind of thing a smartgun could punch straight through.  By the time it was over, and first and second squad regrouped it had been more or less fish in a barrel.  And everybody stopped asking if they could actually trust the ex-cons with the heaviest firepower they had.  Even Sarge seemed impressed, and the sum total of their interactions since her hitch started was him writing her up for insubordination. Repeatedly.

She might've been a little insubordinate. But it was mostly Apone's fault.

The local was bitching about the Corps, about tax dollars, about how they could’ve handled the situation on their own.  Hudson was being his own annoying self.  Vasquez leaned on the bar and took a deep breath.  Wasn’t the headache supposed to come _after_ you were done being drunk? 

And then, Hudson was reeling back, with a bloody nose.  She elbowed the local in the face, and he stumbled back.  His friends steadied him.  Something heavy hit the floor; and she turned to see Drake and Hicks standing up, pitching a table over.  Their Corporal was just one of the guys, apparently.

She got up off her stool, one hand on the bar to maintain balance.  Hudson was throwing out insults as some scrawny local charged at him.  Lot of yelling wasn’t doing her head any favors.  But this was starting to feel real nostalgic; bunch of territorial jackasses on one side, bunch of her people on the other, lot of shouting and violence.

Somehow, she knew this would fall on her head, when Hudson and the other idiot were the ones who started it by running their mouths.  But as she hefted her stool and charged into the fray, Vasquez didn’t quite care.

* * *

“Hello, my name is Private First Class Jenette Vasquez, and I’m here to talk about the Juvenile Military Rehabilitation Program.” She surveyed the room.  She continued on with the bland monologue, seeing the bored faces of near-adult jailbirds. 

The platoon had hit some pretty heavy shit not too long ago.  The Lieutenant had gotten killed, and while Apone and Hicks had gotten them through, they were all beaten to Hell.  So they got rotated back to Gateway station in Earth orbit to regroup.  And while they were waiting to be assigned new leadership, someone contacted her to ask if she’d like to make the USCM sales pitch.

She wasn’t quite sure why she said yes.  She wasn’t much of a talker, and the bland, pre-approved speech she was given to say just felt as hollow to say as it must have been to hear.  What exactly did she expect?

“This is an opportunity for you all to make changes in your life and the lives of others.”  Had she changed?  She’d racked up almost as many citations for insubordination as she had commendations for battlefield performance.  Probably deserved more of both. Maybe she was the same old Jenette Vasquez.  The biggest difference, it seemed was that she found an outlet.

She wasn’t supposed to go off script.

But so what if she did?  The worst they could do was say she was insubordinate.  Again.  “Alright, let me lay something out.  Most of you wouldn’t make the cut.”

She saw something flicker in the groups eyes as she surveyed them.  Annoyance?  Spite?  If it got them to join, that was fine.  One of the prisoners caught her eye; she didn't know him of course, but she got the type down.  Back when she was on the other side of this conversation, one of their fellow detainees, a wannabe revolutionary whose blow against the Military-Industrial complex had accidentally blown his accomplices up instead of whatever corporate headquarters he’d intended, was always rambling.  The government, was like a gang, man.  A protection racket.  They have their territory, and say what you can and can’t do on it.

Vasquez had always guessed he was somewhat right, although mainly because she just didn’t care enough to argue with him.  The difference she noticed and he either didn’t see or didn’t care about was scale.  A gang could control a street, a block, a town maybe.  The government controlled continents, planets, the stars.  Yes, on behalf of their corporate overlords, she’d roll her eyes and agree.  But there was a major difference between contested control off illegal goods and ‘insurance’ in a neighborhood, and accepted power over billions of people.

That might've been an in.  "I'll be honest, nobody would make the cut for this on their own.  They'll ship you to worlds that are meant to break you.  And the only way to get through it is if someone has your back."

That piqued curiousity.

"With civilian recruits, they want to give them habits you already have... a willingness to pull the trigger if need be, for example.  But for a convict, the Corps's job is harder."  She didn't go into an in-depth explanation, because she wasn't sure what had changed about her in training, or her years of service, only that something did change.  Probably.  A marine couldn't just be violent, they needed to be dependably so; able to listen and be violent only when told.  "And so they make it harder on you.  Get through it, do your job, and then after that, you're free."

"I won't lie, the Corps isn't the easy life." Although, regimented as it is, it still was freer than jail time.  She never had to worry about getting shot in prison, but she never had to worry about getting shanked while ducking for cover in a foxhole. And while she'd wanted out of detention ASAP, there was little doubt in her mind she'd be signing up for another hitch when this one was over.  "But it's better than any of your alternatives."

* * *

She wished she could say that she couldn’t feel her feet.  Problem was, s _he could_.  It was just as fucking painful as it had looked when Drake got splashed or how Hudson howled when he got some on his arm.  Her legs were fucking useless; she couldn’t push herself through the vents with them, and those things were still coming; at least she thought they were.  Couldn’t hear too well, hear ears were ringing from all the gunfire in the enclosed vents; she couldn’t even hear her own screams of pain.

Drake was dead.  So were Apone, Hudson, Ferro, Dietrich, Crowe… pretty much everyone except the civilians, Hicks, and fucking Gorman.   She’d been pulling up the rear to keep these things at bay.  Putting holes in every one of the toothy bastards she’d seen.  She knew it wasn’t going to end well, but it would give the others a chance to get away. 

It was her life, and the Corps hadn’t done all that much to change her from that kid she’d been twelve years ago, asked to rat out the rest of her gang.  She’d give her life for the crew.

But then, what did that fucking idiot Gorman do?

He came back for her.

The pencil pusher couldn’t have thought this through.  Because then he would’ve realized that once he went for her, there’d be no way for him to get out; two more corpses for the pile.  The man had shepherded the platoon into an ambush that got most of them killed, figures he’d be the one person stupid enough to come back for her.

Though… idiot or not, he had to have picked up a spine somewhere along the way to risk himself for her.  He was a shitty officer and from what she could gather he panicked in the comfort of the APC, but when it came down to the wire, he had done something that took balls.

It was still stupid.

He hooked his arms underneath hers and began to drag; she stifled her voice at the blinding pain.  The ringing in hear ears had faded enough that she heard something crash from the direction Gorman was dragging her, then something screamed a familiar scream.  Then Gorman started shooting again and after the first bang everything was just ringing again.

From where they’d come from, past the now-still, steaming corpse of the thing that fucked her legs up, she could see something black move in the darkness.  Gorman continued to fire, pressure hammering in her head and the muzzle flare brightening the vent for a split second.  She wasn’t counting his shots.  They didn’t have enough ammo.

She didn’t hear the click, but she saw Gorman drop his pistol, dumb look on his face indicating he might’ve realized this had been a bad plan—either coming back for her or not saving a round for himself.  If they were lucky, the things would kill them outright, or the Atmosphere Processor would go before those things could lay their eggs inside them. 

“You always were an asshole, Gorman.”  She didn’t hear her words but hoped he did somehow.

The Lieutenant had one last brillaint idea.  He held out a small cylinder, flipped off the cap and pressed the button. If she had to pick someone to hold her on their way to Hell, it wouldn’t have been fucking Gorman, but she never had the luxury of choice.

Five.

His hand was shaking as he held the grenade.

Four.

She wrapped her hands around the grenade, and he put his free hand over hers. 

Three.

Something big and black had reached her peripheral vision.

Two.

A heavy paw fell upon her leg, and she almost jerked her hands away.  Almost.

One.

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen the movie dozens upon dozens of times, and can quote all of the major characters, but given the chance to dig a little deeper into one of their pasts was very, very interesting to do. I hope my attempts at worldbuilding worked (there were a few places that struck me as rough), and thank you for the prompt!


End file.
